Understanding Large-Scale Storage Systems

This tutorial is oriented toward administrators and developers who manage and use large-scale storage systems. An important goal of the tutorial is to give the audience the foundation for effectively comparing different storage system options, as well as a better understanding of the systems they already have.

Cluster-based parallel storage technologies are used to manage millions of files, thousands of concurrent jobs, and performance that scales from 10s to 100s of GB/sec. This tutorial will examine current state-of-the-art high-performance file systems and the underlying technologies employed to deliver scalable performance across a range of scientific and industrial applications.

The tutorial starts with a look at storage devices and SSDs in particular, which are growing in importance in all storage systems. Next we look at how a file system is put together, comparing and contrasting SAN file systems, scale-out NAS, object-based parallel file systems, and cloud-based storage systems.

Topics include SSD technology, scaling the data path, scaling metadata, fault tolerance, manageability, and cloud storage. Specific systems are discussed, including Ceph, Lustre, GPFS, PanFS, HDFS (Hadoop File System), and OpenStack.